The noted value manager, whose Cundill Value Fund and sister funds are sold by Mackenzie Financial Corp., was given the Analysts Choice Career Achievement Award in 2001, proclaiming him “the greatest mutual fund manager of all time.”

Born in 1938, Cundill popularized the concept of “Buying a dollar for 40 cents,” still the slogan of his flagship Value Fund. By the 1980s, he was regularly featured in the business press and was profiled by Peter Newman in the The Acquisitors.

While he died in London, UK on January 24th, 2011, his investing legacy — recorded on more than 250 notebooks — has been distilled into a book entitled There’s Always Something to Do. The author is Christopher Risso-Gill, a fellow Londoner who knew Peter for 20 years and was on the Cundill board for ten years.

In Toronto this week, Risso-Gill told me Peter was anxious to see the book in print. Fortunately, five copies were printed in time to get one into his hands a few days before his passing. Peter had been diagnosed in 2006 with an untreatable neurological condition, Fragile X Tremor/Ataxia Syndrome and eventually succumbed to complications from this illness.

12,500 copies ordered by Mackenzie

About 15,000 copies have been printed, 12,500 of them preordered by Mackenzie. Since a trade bestseller in Canada is considered 5,000, that makes it a bestseller in my view, although some argue it’s first necessary to be on certain lists. A second run is already in the works.

Risso-Gill took the better part of a year to read the notebooks, and discussed them over several lunches with Peter. He also had access to another 200 investment notebooks with press clippings and comments appended.

“I had total access to Peter every day and it was an amazing experience …. There were a good many laughs and for him it was like reliving his life.”

Next up is a full biography, Routines & Orgies

The book, which has a foreword from Fairfax Financial’s Prem Watsa, is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. (Peter’s commerce degree was from McGill University). The publicists insist it’s “the only detailed public source of wisdom available from the investing legend.’ It takes a chronological approach to Cundill’s investment life and perforce, includes a fair amount of biographical material.

However, Risso-Gill says he is also writing a true biography about Peter, a project that he was aware of and encouraged. It will be titled Routines and Orgies, a title derived from an obscure travel book by Aldous Huxley.

“Peter had to be dissuaded” from using that title for his investment book, since readers would have the wrong impression of Roman orgies. “That’s not what he meant,” Risso-Gill said, “What he meant was routines were an integral part of being a successful investor and occasionally there was a huge result which he regarded as an orgy.”

While There’s Always Something to Do is an account of his investment life, “his life was much richer and broader than that, as I discovered over two years. He was really a renaissance kind of man. The biography will reveal different aspects of his life and character.”

Risso-Gill previously (in 1971) authored a biography about Ernest Hemingway for a German publisher, which “Peter knew all about.”

But while we await the full biography, there’s enough personal material in the current book to keep it interesting: such as the revelation that the long-distance runner usually did a circuit around new cities he visited on his investment tours.

The globetrotter would likely now be seeking value in Japan

In his heyday, Cundill routinely travelled 100,000 miles a year searching for global bargains. He tried to visit whichever country had the worst performing stock market in the previous 11 months.

Investors can learn much about the “deep value” approach to investing that Cundill learned from Ben Graham’s Security Analysis. How Cundill adapted the “margin of safety” and applied it to a global investing paradigm makes it an educational read.

Cundill’s views on Japan are particularly interesting, given that the flagship fund was at one point 50% invested in Japan. Asked what Cundill would have made of the current buying opportunity in post-earthquake Japan, Risso-Gill said this:

I’m quite certain Peter would have been over there in Japan right now having a closer look. We talked about it six months ago and he said simply that it wasn’t cheap enough to justify investments in light of the problems like an an aging population. But I think he would have wanted to take a very close look.

Asked the main message of the book, Risso-Gill said “it’s fairly simple. If you can understand the principles of value, balance sheets and margin of safety then you ought to be convinced it’s the right way to invest. But that doesn’t mean you must do it yourself. It requires a great deal of skill.”

Cundill was both an accountant and a Chartered Financial Analyst and it would be hard to be a successful value manager without being both, Risso-Gill says. So the vast majority need to seek out value managers that do possess those skills.

Cundill dismissive of indexing

But what about all the research that finds it’s hard for active managers to beat the indexes once their own costs are subtracted?

To be honest, he [Peter] was pretty dismissive of anything of that nature because he felt that by sticking to Ben Graham you were going to consistently beat the index, as he did for 35 years.

I suggest not all his peers and rivals have similar track records. “I’m sure he wouldn’t say this but I would: it takes a lot of skill and hard work.”

Just how much skill can be assessed in the book, which is now available in stores and shortly on Amazon Kindle.